Subfreezing weather conditions often produce icy and extremely slippery walking surfaces. This presents a serious risk of slips, falls and resulting injuries. Indeed, each winter numerous persons suffer broken bones and other forms of injury as a result of slipping and falling on ice covered walking surfaces. Notwithstanding previous efforts to address this danger, slick icy walking conditions remain a constant and annoying problem associated with winter weather and subfreezing temperatures.
A wide variety of footwear attachments have been provided utilizing cleats, spikes and other features designed to improve the wearer's traction on icy and slippery surfaces. These products tend to be fairly awkward to wear and are often impractical and ineffective to utilize on streets, sidewalks, residential walkways, driveways and similar environments. Many of the prior devices are more appropriately suited for mountain camping, wilderness, hiking and/or climbing applications. By the same token, many of the known anti-slip footwear attachments impede the wearer's movement and/or maneuverability. The wearer tends to get “stuck” in the ice; walking is apt to be annoying and frustrating.
Rohde, U.S. Pat. No. 5,485,687 and Harrison, U.S. Pat. No. 6,055,748 have utilized devices featuring a sandpaper or grit material that is applied to the sole of a shoe for improving traction on ice and snow. However, these devices likewise have a number of shortcomings. Both tend to leave significant portions of the shoe sole exposed, which continues to present a serious risk of slipping. The Harrison devices are secured by an adhesive, which is likely to deteriorate and fail, particularly when the footwear is worn in harsh weather conditions. The Rohde device utilizes a Velcro® strap. However, the particular form of attachment featured by that reference is insecure at best. As the wearer walks over snow and ice, the gripping surface, and indeed the entire anti-slip attachment is apt to slide or move along the wearer's shoe. There is even a real possibility that the Rohde traction attachment will slip completely off of the wearer's shoe! In either case, movement of the attachment relative to the footwear increases the possibility that the wearer will experience a nasty slip and fall. Much more snug and secure means for attaching an anti-slip device to various forms of footwear are required.